On the morning of August 29, 2005, a Category 3 hurricane by the name of Katrina slammed into an unprepared Louisiana coastline with sustained winds of 125 miles per hour. In New Orleans, the tidal surge overwhelmed the antiquated levy system and flooded major sections of the city, exacerbating the damage brought on by the hurricane force winds. The disaster, which had long been predicted, had finally happened.
Although President Bush had declared a state of emergency on August 27, two days before the storm, the first response to hurricanes has always fallen to state and local authorities, with FEMA acting in a back-up role. “Within the United States and as delineated in the National Response Plan, disaster response and planning is first and foremost a local government responsibility. When local government exhausts its resources, it then requests specific additional resources from the county level. The request process proceeds similarly from the county to the state to the federal government as additional resource needs are identified. Many of the problems that arose developed from inadequate planning and back-up communications systems at various levels,” said a commission studying the failures of the government response.
President Bush did a fly-over of the area on August 31st, and was on the ground by Friday, September 2nd.
Copyright BP p.l.c.
Almost immediately, before the water had begun to recede, the Bush administration was attacked by the media, democratic politicians, and celebrities as being unresponsive to this national tragedy, and was even accused of being a racist as a majority of the damage fell upon African Americans. In many respects, Bush’s second term never recovered from this onslaught.
Fast-forward five years to this same part of our country. On April 20 the Deep Water Horizon drilling rig suffered a catastrophic explosion which killed 11 people and left the well head gushing into the Gulf of Mexico. Unlike Katrina where the news media had been pre-positioned, it took several days for this event to become a major news story. When it did, the driller, British Petroleum, was still trying to figure out how to stop the flow of oil from the wellhead. As the populace began to look to the government for solutions, President Obama made a trip to the Gulf Coast on May 2, a full twelve days after the event, and summarily pointed the finger at BP. This lapse of time before any administration response was greeted by the media, democratic politicians, and celebrities with … silence. Now, almost two months since the event, oil still flows into the Gulf.
Peacock has never believed that the President of The United States of America should be the Responder in Chief to every national emergency. Frankly, the learning moment in both these tragedies is that no one should count on the government to do anything, or to do it right should they make an attempt. (Government fails spactularily at every thing it touches, and Peacock has often wondered why anyone in their right mind would want more of it.)
Therefore, when two months after the Deep Water Horizon explosion the media slowly began to react to polls that said that 69 percent of the population did not approve of President Obama’s handling of the situation, Peacock felt the same as he did with the criticism of President Bush. These people are not Super Heroes, do not have magical powers, and are they themselves too often victimized by their own tangled and bloated bureaucracies.
Certainly, there was unequal treatment by the media, et al, of these two men, but they were also unequal responsibilities involved. As mentioned previously, in hurricane situations the pre-planning and first response to the storm is left to state and local government. In the case of an oil spill, the legal responsibility falls directly upon the shoulders of the President of the United States.
After the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989, Congress passed legislation making the President responsible for the management of oil spills. Specifically, 33 USC § 1321(c)(1)(A) provides:
The President shall, in accordance with the National Contingency Plan and any appropriate Area Contingency Plan, ensure effective and immediate removal of a discharge, and mitigation or prevention of a substantial threat of a discharge, of oil…
Section 1321(c)(1)(B) discusses specifically what the President may do to carry out the responsibility for an oil clean-up, providing in part:
In carrying out this paragraph, the President may–
(i) remove or arrange for the removal of a discharge, and mitigate or prevent a substantial threat of a discharge, at any time;
(ii) direct or monitor all Federal, State, and private actions to remove a discharge; and
(iii) remove and, if necessary, destroy a vessel discharging, or threatening to discharge, by whatever means are available.
Furthermore, if the discharge of oil from an oil spill is determined to be a “substantial threat to public health or welfare,” then the President must take action to either remove it or mitigate it. Section 1321(c)(2)(A) provides:
If a discharge, or a substantial threat of a discharge, of oil or a hazardous substance from a vessel, offshore facility, or onshore facility is of such a size or character as to be a substantial threat to the public health or welfare of the United States (including but not limited to fish, shellfish, wildlife, other natural resources, and the public and private beaches and shorelines of the United States), the President shall direct all Federal, State, and private actions to remove the discharge or to mitigate or prevent the threat of the discharge.
In the case of President Obama’s, it is not that he was unresponsive to the situation; he just decided to outsource the responsibility to BP, as he done with most all of the major initiatives of his administration. Frankly, this is probably not a bad decision for a man who has no executive experience.
As to the media, what can one say? The left wing bias of our so-called mainstream media is far beyond question. All that anyone has to do is ask themselves “how would the media be covering this situation if it were President Bush, or any other Republican President”?
